|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
Last week I wrote about the impending dinner for the San Ramon Valley Athletic Boosters Hall of Fame at Round Hill Country Club last Thursday.
I was to attend but I was precluded from making it due to being under the weather. By all accounts it was a hugely successful event, which I am sure it was.
One night later Amador Valley honored its most recent Hall of Fame Class in between the junior varsity and varsity football games.
The two events are perfect examples of how you can have an HOF event. It can be as elegant as a dinner in a country club or as simple as honoring people on the football field.
The important thing is every school should have an athletic Hall of Fame. I favor the method of presenting the honorees with their inductions before a varsity football game.
To be honest, I am not sure which schools have Halls of Fame. There might be schools that previously had them, but they have stopped.
The biggest issue facing having a Hall of Fame is finding a person to run it. The larger and more involved the event, the tougher it is to get continuity. Say a person runs it for five years then leaves; there must be someone willing to run it with the same efficiency. We are seeing a lot of those days disappear as people are less willing to make the effort.
Realistically what you need is a display location for a sign or plaque, with the list of all the names, a committee of three to four knowledgeable sports people, and the ability to put together a 20- to 25-minute ceremony each year before a varsity football game.
Having sat on the selection committee for the former Tri-Valley Sports Hall of Fame Selection committee for a number of years, a solid organizational group can get this done in no more than three to four meetings per year.
Solid recordkeeping of people that have been considered in the past allows for potential candidates to be readily available.
There were times we had the next two to three years of inductees already laid out.
The last thing you need is to establish a matrix for the selections. Initially you might want to make up for lost time and bring in a large group to get the ball rolling and drum up some interest.
You take maybe five athletes, a coach, a team and a community service selection for your first one to two years.
Moving forward set a matrix like two males, two females, a coach, a team and a community service spot. Community service is the key. Everyone remembers the athletes, not always the people behind the scenes, like trainers, custodians, workers or anyone else that has a hand in a sport.
Here is my promise – it is so important to me to see every school represented with a Hall of Fame, I will give my time to any school to help get the ball rolling.
Let’s run through the East Bay Athletic League and see how the schools stack up.
Looking around the league, it was great to see the Livermore and Granada Boosters launched a joint Hall of Fame in 2009.
There are some legendary names on these lists, but there are also several more I look forward to seeing.
Let me throw some names out there: Heather DeMuth, Jen Graver, Livermore softball; Joey Wujek, Howie Marion, Granada basketball; Randy Grant, Tom Morton, Jim Joiner, Granada football; and Steve Goodman, Community.
Monte Vista has both a football Hall of Fame – I have been to that one time, and it was awesome – and a regular athletic Hall of Fame. The problem is the Mustangs don’t induct a class every year. They started in 2019, then a 2021 class and finally a 2024 group.
I’ve got some suggestions for the next group – look at field as well as girls’ soccer. I don’t recognize one of the best girls’ soccer players I ever saw take the field on that list.
San Ramon Valley and Amador Valley we have talked about. Both have established Halls of Fame.
California started a hall in 1983 but didn’t have a second class until 1997. From there it became consistent from 2013 to 2019. They added classes in 2023 and 2024. When the next class is added, let me suggest George Tucker in basketball and Chris Robinette, Ricco Brown and Jen Ladouceur in track-and-field.
I am not sure about Dublin High, but the Gaels have a rich athletic history with a series of local icons having suited up for Dublin.
Let me just throw some names out there: Jim Boulware (football and track), Chuck Gangnuss (football and track), Norman Bumgarntner (basketball), Peter and Paul Mangini (soccer), Art Bayless (soccer and football), Kevin Dick (soccer and football), and who could forget Larry and Lester Roberson (football).
On the girls’ side, the one name I remember, Sheryl Staub, was one of the best girls’ basketball players I had a chance to cover.
That brings us all down to Foothill. The school has been around since the mid-1970s and for many years was the standard for excellence in sports.
There’s been a slew of great athletes at the school with several advancing to the professional ranks.
Yet, to this point, no athletic Hall of Fame. There could be a multitude of reasons this has happened, and I will say if someone wasn’t firmly committed to starting one, it’s good they didn’t, as having a half-assed HOF would be worse than not having one.
Will it happen now? As mentioned above, I am willing to help. In fact, here’s the first class I put together after talking with some old school Foothill coaches.
Players
Brandon Crawford (baseball and football) – yes that Brandon Crawford. The legendary San Francisco Giants shortstop was every bit as good in football as he was in baseball. I am not alone in my thoughts that he could have been a D-I football player.
Val Arioto (softball and soccer) was the best female athlete I ever saw and that’s not to slight anyone else but rather praise just how good Arioto was. Dominant all four years on varsity softball, Arioto was the type of person that would throw a no-hitter with 15 strikeouts, then hit a solo home run for a 1-0 win. She excelled at Cal-Berkeley and then the U.S. National Team.
Gary Daniels (football, soccer, track-and-field, baseball) was one of those rare athletes that could play any sport and excel at it. Fast, fast, fast – he just ran away from people in any sport at every position. He ended up playing baseball for BYU then one season in the minor leagues.
Evan Patak (volleyball and basketball), at 6-foot-5, hit the volleyball so hard that I believed every time the Falcons played, someone on the other team would be seriously injured. Played at UC Santa Barbara and for the United States Men’s National Team. In basketball, he also helped the Falcons make the State CIF finals.
Kim Patrick (soccer and softball) was dynamic in everything she did. Her bread and butter was soccer where she ended up going to North Carolina where she was a member of national championship teams for the Tar Heels. I remember one season in softball where she hit over .600 for the season. She was left-handed and slapped the ball, daring the team to throw her out, which didn’t happen that often.
Coaches
Matt Sweeney (football and softball) is someone that needs no bio or qualifications. The main reason Foothill became Foothill. The success of his teams in football carried over to every sport.
Tom Hansen (basketball and athletic director) was the first basketball coach at the school and did win a league title but he was huge as the athletic director, giving their coaches the freedom to build their programs with little interference from the parents, something this is sorely missing in this day and age.
So, there you have it – the first Foothill Athletic Hall of Fame class. Give me a couple of hours and I could probably come up with the first four or five classes, the talent levels are that deep.
Who knows if anything happens, but I would like to see those athletes get the credit they so deserve.
Editor’s note: Dennis Miller is a contributing sports writer for the Pleasanton Weekly. This column originally appeared in Tri-Valley Preps Playbook, a weekly sports e-newsletter published by Embarcadero Media Foundation.
Danville Planning Commission to hear appeal in neighborhood dispute over carport February 9, 2026 11:17 pm